With the project I AM HELPING MY CHILD, the centre’s staff pays special attention to the education of parents and other caregivers of children with special needs. Accurate and appropriate information about the nature and consequences of the children’s conditions may be of real help in alleviating suffering and improving the quality of life. Thus, the parents of children with chronic conditions and disabilities can benefit every Saturday morning from instruction from the centre’s specialists and from those invited from other fields. This theoretical and practical training is dedicated to the issues of nurturing and educating children with chronic conditions.

By providing direct services to beneficiaries and opening physiotherapy services in schools and nurseries in both rural and urban areas, the Hippocrates Centre helps to integrate children with chronic illnesses into general community programs for children. As making recovery services accessible is one of main principles of the Hippocrates Centre, its services significantly augment the number of children using effective and safe physical recovery methods.

The purpose of the project PHYSICAL THERAPY FACILITIES AT SCHOOLS AND KINDERGARTENS is improvement of health of children with chronic diseases which attend schools and kindergartens, by increasing access to physical therapy. The main tasks of this project are opening and supervising 3 offices of physical therapy, 2 in Chisinau and 1 in village, formation of specialists and also supervising them 3 years. Children with chronic diseases which attend these schools and kindergartens will be patients. These offices have been created for the purpose of advancement of physical therapy as profitable method of treatment and disease preventive, and also encouragement and training of healthy way of life since small years.

The purpose of the project TRAINING NURSES IN PHYSICAL THERAPY was to invite 35 nurses from most of the republic’s districts to the Hippocrates Centre and train them in the field of physical functional recovery. As a result, more than 350 children from the entire Republic of Moldova have benefited from higher quality services. Gradually, the number of nurses trained within our centre has reached 54.

The project PHYSIOTHERAPEUTIC HELP AT HOME started in 2004 to enable 14 bedridden children to benefit from physical therapy and occupational therapy at home on a weekly basis. The severity of these children's conditions – who have incurable and, sometimes, progressive diseases – and the poor financial status of the families provided the impetus for us to provide these services, which have proved to have a major impact on the children’s lives. By means of this project, we want to draw the public’s attention to the fact that a having an incurable condition does not mean that a child is untreatable. By using physiotherapy in the advanced stages of many chronic diseases, we can significantly improve the quality of life of our patients by preventing painful complications and improving parent-child relationships.

TONY HAWKS FOR MOLDOVAN CHILDREN this six-year-old project (2001-2007) was launched with the help of Tony Hawks, the famous British writer and comedian, and continues its activities with additional kind support from the British philanthropic organisation ChildAid (formerly A.R.R.C., Aid to Russia and the Christian Republics). This project allows more than 90 children who suffer from chronic conditions, most of them severe disabilities, to benefit from free services at the centre each year. The families of these children are included in continuous education programmes that teach them how to offer adequate care to their children. In addition, the most vulnerable families are given such material support as medicines, hygienic products, and financial aid for vitally necessary surgeries.

The result of this complex activity has been a substantial improvement in most of the children’s health and quality of life. The children and families benefiting from the free services provided by this project have succeeded in overcoming despair and social marginalisation. Health quality indicators show this progress: the decrease in the number of inpatient days (for both emergency hospitalisations and hospitalisations for the purpose of recovery), the decrease in the number of school and kindergarten absences because of health problems, etc.